Google Buzz Is Being Shut Down

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Yeah apparently Google Buzz is going Buuh Bye!

Few days ago Bradley Horowitz, the VP for Google+ made an official announcement on the Google blog saying that Google Buzz is going to be canceled.

“We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on”

Don’t think this is complete death though, the users will be able to view the posts they created on Buzz in their Google Profiles, and download them using Google Takeout. So if you ever felt like your status updates are history worthy you may download and frame it or whatever.. Who doesn’t want to go back and read that 6 months ago their status was “I’m a moron! (cause I left my computer logged on and people made fun of me)” ?!!

Google Buzz was launched in February 2010, for Gmail users in a social networking attempt to let them connect and share content. Initially it was seen as a possible threat to Twitter and Facebook but ended up instead in causing a lot of fuss over privacy. At some point I had the shocking surprise to see that it automatically shared stuff I had on YouTube or Blogger without warning or consent! It was a “nice”  WTF moment!

But ah well, with a lot of complaints from the users and the Federal Trade Commission this apparently served as a lesson for Google. Bradley Horowitz also said: ”We learned privacy is not a feature… it is foundational to the product.”

Maybe he should tell this to Zuckerberg and his new features (see: Facebook tracking user activity even after they log out).

Buzz is not the only one getting the axe, Google is also shutting down other services, some we might have heard (Google Desktop and Google Labs), but most of which we never even heard about. Guess that’s one of the main reason they are being closed, huh? ;)  One of these services is Aardvark, a social search engine that Google bought in 2010 for something like 50 million dollars. Yeah, that’s right, apparently even with the new recession coming up they can afford to do that. They’re just trowing away the old toys to make room for the new ones!

Basically there are spring cleaning to make sure nothing stands in the way of the new favorite son, the Google+ project that has now over 40 million users.  Unfortunately though these people are not using it that often ;)

Guess that’s about it, RIP Buzz and who knows which product will be the next in line to get the axe?